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Adventures in Software Development and Life

Learning is Lifelong

After many years in school and working lowly, but rewarding, jobs in IT, I truly feel learning is one of the best attributes that I possess. It is an attribute that everyone should strive for and keep close to them no matter what.

As I have stated many times before… I am an avid listener of podcasts and video podcasts. I love them because they help me stay up-to-date in this frequently changing world of IT. I would have to say my newest vidcast that I have been enjoying lately has been HAK5. They are just a bunch of real down to earth people talking about technology! They are a bit goofy but that’s okay with me. I believe they were recently added to revision3, and I’m quite glad they were.

I really enjoyed the piece by Chris Gerling on reverse engineering on .NET applications (and more). This is a very handy skill to have especially since I work with .NET. As I watched the podcast I didn’t think much about it. I found it to be very cool and engrossing; tres geek. I like how they broke the segment down onto multiple episodes (inside of being deluged).

Come a few weeks later (now), a couple of the network guys came to my cube and asked me if I could help them with an application a previous developer wrote. I politely said “Sure! Not a problem”, which they responded with “Great one catch though, all we have is the EXEcutable and we need it ASAP”. I think that was actually two catches, but anyhow.

I said calm and coolly, “all we need to do is decompile the application get the source code and we’ll be ready to go”. I suspect it was not the answer they were expecting. I was calm and cool because I just watched the great hak5 episodes that involved reverse engineering! Hot dog. I earned major cred points for my attitude and how quickly I was able to reproduce the code for the problem.

After inspecting the code we found the problem to be a configuration code; not a development bug. This was such a critical step the problem solving process. This also proves that learning is a lifelong process that needs to continue beyond school and become apart of your life.

That’s a great attitude Brent, and in my opinion, more important than anything else. I love to learn so much, it’s overshadowed what I’m actually learning at times…haha!

Every time I read, see or hear something I don’t know, I become interested in it and learn about it. For instance, if I see a word I’ve never used or don’t know the meaning of, I write it down on a note pad and learn all about it – until I know it and use it in everyday language. I apply that to everything.